Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

Wow! I found something very, very cool. This hopefully could constitute a new era in the Internet!

Firstly– I don’t know about you– but my 8+ blogs are clogged with tons of spam comments. I also get a good amount of email spam every day (many of them are emails leading to phishing sites). Most spam use a “proxy list“; that is, the spammers hide behind fake IP addresses. It is very difficult to determine the sources of these proxy IP addresses. I know that the ton of comment spam I get on all my blogs is sent by “bots” (electronic, programmed software) and sent out on a massive scale. It is extremely frustrating to find out who is spamming me and where all this spam junk is coming from. I spend about a half hour to an hour, sifting through my spam filter, deleting the spam filth and looking to see if my filter caught any real comments. It’s a disgusting, laborious job and I loathe it. And the spam rips me off, too, becauseit robs my websites of precious bandwidth and CPU resources. So it comes at a great personal cost to me.

Ah, but there is progress being made with this. IP2Proxy IP-COUNTRY Anonymous Proxy List is one of them. It’s a family of software dedicated to detecting the IP address behind the proxy. This is from their website:

The simple fact is that a lot of Web masters don’t want or need the traffic from these anonymous IP address. The detection of open proxy servers is complicated and time-consuming process as it required port scanning and detection. The IP address re-allocated frequently and the proxy server detection technology need to be updated regularly. IP2Proxy™ is a simple Web solution that simplifies anonymous proxy server detection and turns it as simple as a query of IP address from a local database.

On a small scale– individual level like me– this software is probably beyond my budget and need. BUT if web hosting companies and businesses started using this kind of software across the board, I think we’d see a lot of “glasnost” when it comes to Internet fraud and spam. Here, here!!!

The website does have some smaller, free tools. Here’s one where you can lookup any IP address. It is small enough to fit in your sidebar.

Check out the site. I’m really hoping this helps to solve the complex problem of criminal activity hiding behind proxies. Enough is enough!